Liberty City in GTA5 mod shut down

OpenIV, which many consider to be the most important GTA-related mod project around, has been allowed to continue after Take-Two lawyers issued its creators a cease and desist last month.

The bad news is the ambitious mod project Liberty City in GTA5 has been forced to shut down.

In a post on the GTAForums, the OpenIV team said the development of OpenIV would continue as before. "OpenIV never supported GTA Online modding and will not support it in the future," the statement reads. "Our work will be continued within the Rockstar modding policy."

Then onto Liberty City in GTA5: "Unfortunately, our highly anticipated mod Liberty City in GTA5 will not be released because it clearly contradicts with Rockstar modding policy. Liberty City mod is a big loss for us, since it was a huge part of our motivation to push OpenIV functionality.

"If you are wondering what is next, well, we are currently revising our plans for the future."﻿

The idea behind Liberty City in GTA5 was, as you'd expect, to put Rockstar's fictional recreation of New York inside its latest game, GTA5. Liberty City, which was the setting for GTA3 and 4, was not supposed to replace GTA5's Los Santos or Blaine County, but appear across the sea. The goal was you'd be able to fly between the regular Los Santos map and GTA 4's Liberty City map.

Take-Two had accused OpenIV of opening the door for people to tinker with GTA Online. "Take-Two's actions were not specifically targeting single player mods. Unfortunately OpenIV enables recent malicious mods that allow harassment of players and interfere with the GTA Online experience for everybody," Rockstar said after the cease and desist notice was sent.

It sounds like Rockstar had a word with its parent company, Take-Two and in a post on its website said: "Take-Two has agreed that it generally will not take legal action against third-party projects involving Rockstar's PC games that are single-player, non-commercial, and respect the intellectual property (IP) rights of third parties.

"This does not apply to (i) multiplayer or online services; (ii) tools, files, libraries, or functions that could be used to impact multiplayer or online services, or (iii) use or importation of other IP (including other Rockstar IP) in the project."

Liberty City in GTA5 falls afoul of that last line there: "importation of other IP (including other Rockstar IP) in the project."

It'll be interesting to see how much effort the people behind OpenIV continue to put into the mod, now Liberty City in GTA5 is dead. Reading between the lines of its statement, the OpenIV community sounds disheartened by recent developments.